Kolkata: The recent history of encounter deaths in Bengal stretches back almost six decades but several factors have made these episodes stand out from each other across the different regimes that have governed Bengal since the 1960s. During the Naxal movement, encounters became a prominent fixture in Bengal with many young, brilliant students—several of them from Presidency College, Jadavpur University and BE College—being killed in police encounters. Neighbourhoods of Kolkata still recall police’s “midnight knocks” to pick up those, allegedly associated with the movement.A retired public servant, Sunish Deb, who was an active Naxal movement member, recalled, “It was Nov 1970 when cops picked up four youths from the Beleghata CIT quarters at night, including Ashok Basu, a meritorious engineering student from JU, lined them up against a wall of the complex, and shot them dead. At that time, Beleghata Police Station OC was Anil Ghosh Dastidar, who himself narrated the incident to me at DD Lalbazar on July 20-24, 1972,” Deb said. “On Aug 4, 1971, Saroj Dutta was arrested by the Special Branch from Raja Basanta Roy Road in the dead of night. Early on Aug 5, he was taken to the Maidan and shot dead. Umpteen number of such incidents crowded newspapers those days. Most times, police claimed the youths either tried to run away or snatch their revolvers and they had to fire in self defence.”In the Left Front regime, the frequency of encounters dropped. APDR vice-president Ranjit Sur said, “In Left times, Asim Mondal, a Janajuddha (People War group) activist, was killed in a police encounter in West Midnapore. The Lalgarh movement saw a massive surge in encounters, with numerous activists and tribal residents being killed by security forces in West Midnapore and surrounding areas. Such killings were also reported during the Gorkhaland movement under Subhash Ghising.”The Calcutta High Court verdict by Chief Justice Surendra Singh Nijjar and Justice Pinaki Chandra Ghose, holding the Nandigram firings on March 14, 2007, as “totally unconstitutional” led to the halt of police firings. It was decided that cops could fire only when the “right to self defence” could be established.Bteven the Trinamool regime came under intense scrutiny with the encounter of Maoist leader Kishenji.Recalling the same, human rights activist Ranjit Sur said, “One of the most high-profile encounters of the TMC era was the killing of top Maoist leader Kishenji. Alongside Kishenji, other Maoist figures such as Yudhisthir Mahato were also killed in operations that we, the human rights activists believe, were staged executions. The renewed agitations for a separate Gorkhaland state during the TMC regime also witnessed encounter deaths.”In recent years though, encounters in Bengal have transitioned from political counter-insurgency to targeted anti-crime operations. This was evident when gangsters fleeing a bloody gang war in Punjab took shelter in Kolkata’s Sukhobrishti housing complex in New Town, where they were eventually tracked down and killed in a high-stakes apartment gunfight by the police. More recently, in January 2025, a twenty-five-year-old murder accused named Sajjad Alam, who was on the run after shooting his police escorts in a prison van, was gunned down just eight hundred meters from the international border in Chopra before he could escape into Bangladesh. But Sur said that APDR’s fact-finding committee found that it was a fake encounter.BOX:· Naxalite Period (1960s–1970s): The bloodiest phase, marked by aggressive counter-insurgency and “midnight knocks.” Countless brilliant students from colleges and universities were killed in alleged staged staged actions like the Beliaghata and Maidan executions.· Left Front Era (1977–2011): Urban shootouts dropped, shifting to regional political pockets like Gorkhaland and the Maoist-led Lalgarh movement. District police also targeted organized criminal syndicates until a landmark Calcutta High Court verdict on the Nandigram firing restricted police operations strictly to established self-defense.· Trinamool Era (2011–2025): Rare but highly explosive political encounters occurred, most notably the controversial 2011 killing of top Maoist leader Kishenji in Jhargram, which rights groups labeled a staged execution.· The Present situation from 2021: Encounters have completely transitioned from political counter-insurgency to targeted, high-stakes anti-crime actions. Recent cases include the New Town apartment shootout against Punjab gangsters, the January 2025 Chopra border encounter, and the recent custodial encounter of the Baruipur rape suspect.
